


14,000,605

by Disappearing_Yesterdays



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Ashes Scene in Avengers: Infinity War Part 1, Avengers 3 - Freeform, Avengers Infinity War, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Doctor Strange - Freeform, Infinity (Marvel), Infinity War, Infinity War (Marvel Comics), M/M, One Shot, Spoilers, Strange's adventures through Time, Titan, Violence, depictions of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-05-08 05:07:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14687118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Disappearing_Yesterdays/pseuds/Disappearing_Yesterdays
Summary: WARNING: CONTAINS INFINITY WAR SPOILERSStephen Strange saw Fourteen million six hundred and five different future outcomes, and only one of them lead to victory. This is what he experienced in that moment





	14,000,605

_14,000,601_

_-Everyone dies._

There are certain scenarios, certain images, certain people that won’t lose their impacts when you see them on repeat. Some things don’t gain immunity. For all your old jokes that no longer leave you laughing, and your regular viewings of horror movies that leave you fearless in the presence of a fictional serial killer, there are elements that will still send your heart racing and make fear pump through your body like the blood in your veins.

There are some things that will never not leave an impact.

_14,000,602_

_-Everyone dies._

Seeing the people you are surrounded by falling and dying and falling and dying and suffering and fighting and fleeing and falling and dying, over and over and over. This is the battleground, and this is the war that is showing unlikely to be won. This is the path they are on now. Soldiers in a war, claiming to be fighting a good fight but more successfully finding a way to commit suicide and then later be declared heroes.

Wars leave surviving heroes with memories as painful as scars, as painful as weeping open wounds. And currently, Stephen Strange was self-inflicting these wounds by his own accord. Over and over and over. Everyone dies. Thanos gets the stone from him. The heroes lose. He wins.

_14,000,603_

_-Everyone dies._

Every. Single. Time

It’s questionable if it was possible to have fourteen million six hundred and three different ways to watch your surroundings perish. No one would have known that murder and pain had such a vast amount of translations.

There were three reoccurring themes that persisted in all of the outcomes. Three definitive facts that no matter how they approached, how they fought, how they surrendered or how they died, that stayed the same.

One: Doctor Stephen Strange will die.

It’s not fun to experience death, but to feel it play out over and over in a plethora of ways is an onslaught of torture. To be crushed and to hear your own spine cracking as a large golden gauntlet squeezes the life out of you. To feel your last breath pass through your dry lips, dehydrated as a stone on a Titan’s glove removes all water from your body. To watch your own form melt, and then freeze, and then melt, and then freeze, deforming and crumbling and then being fixed into various places until you are no more than a literal bag of bones and flesh. To watch, and wince, at the sensation of your body crumbling, and then blowing away as dust, becoming nothing more than another speck on a barren planet.

Doctor Stephen Strange will die. And he has accepted it.

Two: Thanos will get the Time Stone.

No matter how much the sorcerer supreme resisted, and protected, and suffered, Thanos would find a way to pry the stone from Strange’s spell-bound fingertips. It varied from bribery, to torture, to surrender, to hypnotism, to hallucinations. There was far and few between the expected methods, and the unexpected methods. But whatever it was, Thanos did it. And whatever it was, Thanos succeeded.

No matter what sort of resistance Stephen will give, Thanos _will_ get the Time-Stone

Three: Tony Stark will die.

He didn’t know Tony Stark too well. Only from what he had seen of the Iron armour and the reckless philanthropist that so regularly took up the headlines in The Daily Bugle. Tony Stark was a hero. He was one of the firsts, and he had always been so cocky with his title. He was always so messy and he was disgusting with the ways he had displayed his wealth to the world. Not that Stephen wasn’t one to show off when he had the chance. In his neurosurgeon days especially, he was an advocate for showing off.

‘If you got it, flaunt it’.

No other phrase could be more associated with both men who were accustomed with goatees. Perhaps that was why he had never been such a fan. He saw into the other man’s actions, and he saw too much of what he already knew.

And yet, having met him, having fought alongside him over and over, he gained something. Some sort of weird sentiment and fondness of having him fighting by his side. Him and his pop-cultured spider-child. There was something he felt for the duo.

The kid and Stark had a bond that Strange frequently looked to and observed, appreciating and enjoying. He wasn’t involved, but he could acknowledge something that he didn’t have himself anymore.

A loved one. A mentor. A person that you can look to on the battlefield and protect, and be protected, and feel calmer by. Tony Stark had Peter Parker to protect. Tony Stark had that motivation. But his protective nature was foolishly unrestrained. Tony Stark made sure he was protecting _everyone._ He had a trait that Stephen had lost track of. The importance of caring. Every single time that Tony Stark had died, he had been doing all that he could to protect everyone else. He had been helping his team if and where he could. He was the heart of a group. A sarcastic, sharp-tongued, overall powerful heart.

But, he knew. Thanos, he knew that Tony Stark was important. He knew that Tony Stark was strong and could do so much. Thanos always knew. Somehow, to make things stay the way they became, Tony Stark would have to die. ‘Cursed with knowledge’ he had claimed. Those words, he spoke those words within every future. Every time, he had known Stark, and he had regarded him as a worthy opponent. But every time, he had killed Stark. The Iron Man had fallen, and his light went out.

It pained Strange every time. A light switch, leaving the planet in darkness. A man he had slowly began to understand left an entire universe in darkness. His presence ceasing, and his cohorts weeping, crying, clinging onto his resting corpse.

There was a feeling amongst strangers, strangers who were forced to rely on one another, every time he died. It was a heavy feeling of doom and loss. Take the heart out of a man, and the man stops. That’s what it felt like every time Stark died. And it hurt. Every time Strange lived through it, it pained not just Stark, but pained him.

_14,000,604_

_-Everyone dies._

The moments fly past once again, and the team is dying. They are losing. Everyone is left weak and helpless, including Strange. His shaking hands pushed down into the Earth, and he slowly raises his head up. Stark has a blade through his body and is held up in the air by the brutish Titan. Blood dribbles out between his lips and drips down onto his torso. Tony Stark is in a crucial condition, and he is dying. The man is in pain, and he drops to the ground like a cold corpse.

He is stunned, but it is evident on Stark’s face that he is at the point of accepting death. He will allow this, knowing he did all that he could to stop Thanos and prevent the infinity stone from being in his grasps. He had prepared himself for death as soon as he stowed away on the ship. He did all he could, he tells himself. He did all he could.

“Stark,” the Titan steps up to the dying man at his feet, his gauntlet illuminated in the dim atmosphere of the planet. “You have my respect. I hope the people of Earth will remember you.”

Stark and Thanos keep eye contact, and in these moments, Strange knows that he is about to witness, once again, the death of a hero. The death of an idol. The death of a genius. And Strange knows that it would all grind to an end. Everyone, once more, would die again.

… _Unless_.

“ **Wait**!”

Their gaze turns to him, his intrusion enough to stop another death of Iron man. Starks eyes are wide, but his breath is still pinned back by the spear through his chest. Strange shakily sits upright and positions himself so that he is no longer holding himself up. He lets out a loud exhale, looking over the two. Thanos waits, staring the sorcerer down. For Strange had yet to try just one option.

“Spare his life, and I’ll give you the stone.”

A life for an infinity stone. It seems foolish, it feels so wrong, every fibre of his being told him to stop. But it has become clear by now that Thanos knew something about Stark. Stark is a key element. If there is a chance to break any of the looping rules that were happening in these timelines, then it is an opportunity that needed to be pursued. It was time, yet again, to bargain.

“No tricks?”

Strange had to watch the dread and the disappointment pass over Stark’s features. The confusion and every negative emotion that a man could express to his fellows made an appearance in Tony’s expression. But it was better to see a disappointed man than to see a dead one.

The stone is plucked from the stars, and then it finds its way into the golden glove.

And then, as everything comes to pass, the soldiers on the battlefield start turning to ashes. Stark remains alive, their teams survivor and the witness of their of deaths. Once again, Strange feels his body disappearing, fading, and unwinding. Cell-by-cell, skin molecule by skin molecule, Strange’s body crumbles and disappeared.

Stephen Strange, once more, has died.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“…Strange?”

There was his voice. That voice he had listened to over fourteen million times and had grown accustomed to. There was life. That of his form that had been unwinding and undoing itself started knitting back together again. Shattered flesh no longer appears to undo him, but puts him back together.

“Strange, y-alright?”

This was the path they had to take. The path where a man manages to fix everything that is lost on a battlefield. Tony Stark will find a way. Tony stark would be able to bring them all back.

This was the moment.  The moment of revival, of reanimation, of reliving all that he had lost.

Stephen gasps loudly as he tumbles down onto the ground, his form now solid and his body in the same shape he always remembers it being. He is caught. Two arms of steel support him and holds him up and makes sure he won’t go crumbling down again.

“It’s okay, you’re okay.”

Strange pants, breathing in and out heavily as it sinks in. Tony needs to live. Tony is the one to reverse the irreversible. A man of Earth with so much he still needed to learn. This was it. This was the man. He begins to realise what it was he felt towards the other.

“I went forward in time to view alternate futures. To see all the possible outcomes of the coming conflict.”

The man’s brown eyes do not regard him with disbelief. They regard him as a person, as an equal. Strange had viewed Stark as an idiot, but now?

 He holds so much respect for him. He sees Stark as a man with strength and courage beyond comprehension. Stark holds little respect for himself these days, but at this moment Strange is sure he holds enough for them both.

“How many did you see?”

_14,000,605_

 “Fourteen million six hundred and five.”

_-Everyone dies_

It all relies on him. It all relies on Tony Stark. The man who started it all -he is the one to end it.

“How many did we win?” Tony asks.

**_-But they will be brought back._ **

“One.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! I have no idea what's going to happen in Avengers 4, but I found it incredibly interesting that as soon as Strange looked into the future outcomes, he immediately respected and regarded Tony as important. Strange became a fast favourite for me, especially after this movie, and I'm hoping he reappears in Avengers 4 for some well needed bibidibobidiboo magic.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed!


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